


Unfinished Business

by MaryPSue



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Transcendence, Gen, mentions of gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-18
Updated: 2015-10-18
Packaged: 2018-04-27 00:53:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5027401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryPSue/pseuds/MaryPSue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The legendary demon hunter Wendy Corduroy has to face an unpleasant realisation about one of her best friends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unfinished Business

**Author's Note:**

> Crossposting some old-ish TAU fic from my [tumblr](http://marypsue.tumblr.com).

There was a person in an orange vest mopping the platform floor when Dipper dropped down through the ceiling of the subway station. They paused, briefly, looking up as though they’d just heard someone call their name, before turning back to their work.

The water they dragged their mop through had a pinkish tinge.

Dipper ignored the custodian, floating past them, around behind the escalators, following the trail of freshly-mopped floor to the swinging gate with its DO NOT ENTER sign. He swept through it, incorporeal but still leaving it swinging slightly in his wake.

They hadn’t even tried to mop up the blood back here. It had soaked into the concrete, leaving a trail of dark spots that Dipper followed down off the maintenance platform, into the tunnels and the vast, cavernous space where the trains switched tracks. The dark spots grew in size as he followed, becoming more unevenly spaced and closer together, as though the wound had opened further while the injured person had been running, as though she had slowed, her steps faltered, until finally the trail ended in a larger dark patch against the concrete.

Dipper stopped at the end of the trail, looking around at the echoing, artificial twilight under the city, the massive concrete pillars supporting tons upon tons of earth and architecture overhead. “Wendy?”

The only answer to his shout was the distant rush and clatter of an approaching train.

Dipper turned in a slow circle, searching the cavernous tunnel for any sign of his friend. He froze at the sight of more dark spots, like the ones he’d followed down here, spattered up across one of the concrete pillars. He traced their slashing arc up, up, until it disappeared into shadow near the ceiling of the tunnel, out of the glow of the orange tunnel lights.

“ _Wendy!”_ Dipper yelled again, the vast underground space throwing back his own voice in a mocking echo of his fear. 

The sound of the oncoming train swept over Dipper before he could even see the train as anything but a light beaming against the wall at the end of the tunnel. The train itself flashed past in a blur of rattling, flickering light and shadow, thundering over the tracks at a volume that would have been hard on human ears, wind whipping around Dipper and kicking up a storm of dust. Its echoes lingered long after it had vanished around the next corner, slowly settling into the eerie background hum and whoosh of the tunnels.

It was cold down here, Dipper realised, a kind of cold that even he, immaterial, could feel. It was the cold of the lightless world under the earth, the cold of buried things and dead concrete and - 

“Hey, Dipper. What’s up, man?”

Dipper took a deep breath he didn’t need, steeling himself before he turned. 

Wendy had one hand on her hip, an eyebrow raised as if to ask what the deal was. She hadn’t been fourteen for a long time, that much was clear from the roundness her face had lost, the fine lines of weather and wear that encircled her eyes and her smile, the few inches of height she’d gained and the lean muscle that had given definition to her bare shoulders and arms, but the glint in her eyes and the quirk of her smile had never changed. 

When Dipper didn’t say anything, she crossed her arms over her chest, canting her head to one side. “Yo, what’s your damage, Dip? You look like you just saw a ghost.”

Dipper managed a weak smile at that, and Wendy let out an exasperated sigh. “Dude, stop acting like you’re at a funeral. It’s not  _that_  bad. Sure, that thing took a chunk out of me, but, like, I just got cocky. Gotta remember that I don’t move as fast as I used to.” She pressed a hand to her side, to the dark patch seeping across the front of her tank top, and winced. “Well, lesson learned, I guess. Next time -”

“There’s not gonna be a next time.”

Wendy paused, her expression freezing. Behind her, another subway train tore past, spilling light in huge speeding patches across the concrete between her and Dipper. Through her head, Dipper caught a glimpse of one of the train’s riders turning to look in their direction, before the last car whipped past and was gone.

Wendy shrugged, though there was still something frozen about her expression, her shoulders drawing tight despite the playful teasing in her voice. “What, is this more of your weird demon overprotectiveness? Because if I need to remind you what happened the last time you tried to stop me from -”

“Wendy,” Dipper said, as gently as he could.

Wendy shook her head. She was still smiling, though, so Dipper pressed on.

“Wendy, you -”

“Dipper, shut up.”

“But -”

“Just…just shut up, okay?” Wendy brushed a lock of hair out of her face, blue flames curling around her fingertips.

Another train thundered past behind Dipper, filling the tunnel with a muted roar and the clatter of wheels over the tracks. The fluorescent lights washing over her face made Wendy look paler, a sickly greenish-white, shadows hollowing out her eyes in long flashes. The bluish light she cast barely left a graveyard glimmer on the stained concrete nearly a metre under her feet.

“So,” Wendy said, finally, her eyes following Dipper’s line of sight down towards the dark patch on the concrete where the trail of blood had ended. “Guess the whole flaming hair-flaming axe-see-through thing should have been a dead giveaway, huh?”

“ _Wendy,”_ Dipper groaned. 

“Sorry, dude! I know, I just - you don’t get an opportunity to make puns like these every day.” She grinned. “I’d say it’s once in a lifetime, but -”

“Okay,  _stop_ ,” Dipper said, holding up a gloved hand. “That is  _terrible_.”

Wendy shrugged nonchalantly, tossing her head back and sending a few little tongues of flame licking up through the freezing air. “Not as terrible as being run to ground and then ripped in half by a hatchling demon.” She laughed out loud at the look of frozen horror Dipper knew must be on his face, but it was a little too loud in the echoing tunnel, a little too high, a little too fast, and her smile was a little too strained when she stopped. “You know, I think it was picking bits of me out of its teeth with my own rib when it left?”

“I’m sorry,” Dipper said, barely able to hear his own voice over the hollow wailing of the tunnels.

“Just - don’t tell anybody this is how I went out, okay? Not very legendary.” Wendy’s mouth twisted up in a grimace as she looked down at the glowing blue axe in her right hand, giving it a casual toss. It spun in midair, turning into a wheel of blue fire before the handle smacked back into Wendy’s hand. “So, mister all-knowing…now what?”

Dipper swallowed, hard, tugging at his bowtie. “Wendy, you’re a ghost.”

“Um, duh.” Wendy waved one hand through her midriff, laughing as it rippled. Dipper wondered if she could hear the edge in her own laughter. “Check it out!”

“No, you don’t get it! Don’t you remember that old couple at the Dusk 2 Dawn?” Dipper threw his arms out, his wings echoing the movement. He saw Wendy’s grip on her axe tighten, the muscles along her right arm and through her shoulders going tense, the way her stance widened and steadied, and tried to smother the little ember of queasy uncertainty that bloomed in the pit of his stomach. “Something kept you here, something you felt strongly enough that you couldn’t shake it off, and now…” He took a deep breath, letting his wings fold back behind him. “You’re stuck.”

Wendy tried to smile, but it fell flat halfway through. “Dude, what are you talking about?”

“You’re trapped here, Wendy! Instead of getting to - move on, reincarnate, start over, you’re stuck in this creepy echoey tunnel for the rest of eternity! Unless somebody  _exorcizes_  you, which is even worse!”

“Dipper, get a grip!” Wendy shook her head, but not before Dipper caught a glimpse of the fear that shot through her expression. "Stop freaking out, man. You’re, like, the all-knowing, all-powerful Alcor the Dreambender. You’ll figure something out, right?”

Dipper didn’t answer. 

The hope in Wendy’s voice was like an anvil crushing his lungs. “Right?”

Dipper tried to look away, but his eye was dragged to the spatter of dark stains across the concrete pillar he turned towards.

“There is…one thing I could do,” he said. The words tasted bitter on his tongue, fell into the echoes of distant trains like weights sinking through fog. “But you’re not gonna like it.”

“Dipper, I’ve been tearing the guts out of horrifying monsters for the past, like, thirty years or whatever.” Wendy crossed her arms and plastered on a deliberate, defiant smile. “I think I can handle it.”

Somewhere in the depths of the tunnels, water dripped, a clear, sharp note in the dull mechanical roar and the eerie howl of the wind.

“To cut the ties that are keeping you here and get rid of the energy that’s making you haunt this place…” Dipper shut his eyes, trying desperately to banish the memories of Wendy alive, smiling and happy and living, that crowded in behind his eyes. “I’m going to have to eat your soul.”

When a minute passed without a sound, Dipper risked cracking open one eye.

Wendy wasn’t smiling anymore. She didn’t look upset, either, though, and that same ember of unease flared into life in the pit of Dipper’s stomach. “Wendy…?”

Wendy shook her head slowly, like she was just waking up. Her right hand tightened on the handle of her axe, and Dipper floated back a few inches as she raised her other hand and pressed it against the side of her head, a small, rueful smile slowly splitting her face.

“I should have known,” she said, in a low voice. “I can’t believe I didn’t see it.”

“Wendy, I’m sorry,” Dipper started, and though Wendy didn’t raise her head, her eyes flicked up to meet his, flaring an unearthly blue.

“No, Dipper, I’m sorry,” she said, straightening up, giving her axe a few lazy swings. “Sorry I didn’t see it sooner.”

“It’s not your fault, Wendy. Nobody wants to -” Dipper glanced down at himself, felt the power rushing under his illusory skin, and managed to go on with only minimal cracking in his voice. “Nobody wants to believe their life as they knew it is over forever.”

Wendy nodded, the flames that were her hair slowly spreading out behind her as she took a hovering step forward. “Nobody wants to believe the worst of their friends.”

Dipper fluttered an inch or so backwards.

“I, uh, get the feeling we’re talking about two different things now,” he said, cursing the quaver in his own voice.

The smile on Wendy’s face wasn’t a smile at all, but an angry grimace. “You know, I really wanted to believe you were different,” she said, casually hefting her axe onto her shoulder. “But you’re not. You’re all full of lies and tricks and selfishness. And in the end, all you really want is power.”

“Wendy,” Dipper said. Wendy’s hair flared behind her, a huge gout of blue flame, the glow from her insubstantial body filling the tunnels with undersea light as her eyes went solid with the blue glare and her face contorted into a scream of rage.

“You’re nothing but a  _demon_!”

“Wendy, please!” Dipper begged, falling back farther as she advanced, all blue flame and righteous fury. He was nearly on the tracks now, in the path of the oncoming train. “I’m trying to help you -”

Wendy spun her axe again, and threw it, the wheel of fire tearing by Dipper’s face so close he could feel how cold it was, cold enough to burn. She smiled, a grim, satisfied smile Dipper had only seen her wear a few times, times when he’d have been glad to his core to never see it again.

“And you know what I do?” Wendy said, softly, raising a hand. The axe screamed back through the air, the handle slapping into her palm with a satisfyingly solid noise. She held it aloft for a moment, and Dipper heard the crackling of the flames that engulfed it clearly over the rattle and wail of the approaching train.

“I kill demons,” the ghost of Wendy Corduroy, legendary hunter and protector, legendary goof-off and good friend, thirty years or whatever a good friend, said triumphantly, and brought the axe down -

…

“Lord Alcor?” The summoner sounded pompous, annoyed that the demon he’d summoned wasn’t jumping at his every command. “It is a simple request, worth much less than the fine sacrifice we have offered you. We just want to know how the demon hunter Wendy Corduroy died.”

“Changed my mind,” Dipper said, inspecting his gloves and carefully ignoring the man, ignoring the temptation to grab the man by the shoulders and shake him, fill his mind with the worst kind of nightmare, the knowledge of what it meant to not only fail a dear friend to her death, but then to have to - “Deal’s off.”

The man’s sputtering might have been amusing to stay and listen to, but Dipper had had enough. With a tip of his hat and a mocking bow, he vanished, back into the mindscape, leaving the summoner knee-deep in pig guts and no wiser than he had been before.


End file.
